A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present by Robert Muchembled (review)

Robert Muchembled has explored violence throughout his career in a series of studies of the region of Artois and of France more broadly, and his key arguments are presented as a unified thesis here in the English translation of his 2008 Une Histoire de la violence (Seuil).

Significantly, what Muchembled really means by violence is something much more particular. His interest is homicide, a crime whose value is in its shared meaning across time and European cultures which makes it measurable for the kind of large-scale analysis intended here. As such, the changing cultural definitions and nature of many other violent behaviours are not examined. With this starting premise, the answers that can be ascertained are necessarily broad-brush on the one hand and limited on the other.

Moreover, there are frequent slippages and generalisations about what violence means and does as a result. For example, the focus on homicide concentrates attention on the cultural codes and behaviours of a certain type of young male offender (and victim). This provides valuable insights but Muchembled’s broader claims that violence is in decline in the modern era really only hold if we understand it as a particular act that is carefully controlled by legal institutions. What of boxing, domestic, and verbal forms of violence? Muchembled, however, claims his thesis goes further since, for example, there has been no ‘major military conflagration’ in Europe since 1945 (p. 304).

Muchembled’s overarching argument is that state intervention, from municipal action to legislative and punitive regimes, has been crucial since the Middle Ages in reducing violence in everyday life. Changing cultural codes of (masculine) conduct filtered from the elite down to the peasantry, except for a small proportion (of young men) for whom status and identity were forged through violence. The continuing power of honour culture is one example.

After defining violence and its capacity for measurement, Muchembled examines violent youth cultures of the Middle Ages and the involvement of urban organisation in shaping conduct. He identifies a changing sentiment towards violence from 1500–1600 and examines first resistance to it, then widespread acceptance over the period 1650 to 1950. Muchembled argues that sensationalist narratives in popular literature and culture helped to satisfy latent aggression and desire for morbid thrill, shifting homicide from reality to fantasy.

Much of his material naturally comes from previous studies of Artois and France, and women are very much the second sex in this analysis. They are rarely present as perpetrators, featuring largely in the discussion of infanticide, nor are ‘daughters of Eve’ often victims for, Muchembled suggests, ‘when they are struck by men, it tends to be with a degree of moderation, as the latter often avoid sustained attacks in their faces, bellies or reproductive organs’ (p. 2). This may reflect their statistical representation but seems a lost opportunity to explore gendered, as opposed to masculine, dimensions of homicide in more detail.

The scholarship of violence is vast. Muchembled explores philosophical and psychological approaches in considering long-term aggressive behavioural trends. He alludes to rather than engages directly with research by historians, and the more recent cultural analyses of historical violence focused on close readings and contexts is not the aim here.

Much of Muchembled’s work in this area will already be known to early modern historians, perhaps making his readership here those from other disciplines. A delay of five years in translating the original work means that it inevitably cannot engage with the most recent research in the field. It is an ambitious work, reflecting the achievement of an impressive career, but whether it is equally the springboard for future research in this area, for historians or for other scholars of violence, is less certain.